Joshua Macht, Executive Vice President, Product Innovation, and Group Publisher of the Harvard Business Review Group, ”Recasting Management Ideas”

In our October 2017 podcast, his first session with Tripp, Joshua Macht, Executive Vice President, Product Innovation, and Group Publisher of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) Group, shares his goal of how to recast management ideas to those new to management, with a focus on innovation, strategy, and core principles of leadership.   

Long before he traveled to Gothenberg, Sweden in 2016 to attend an international healthcare conference, Josh was aware of Dr. Deming as an "old friend" of management, much the same as he assessed Peter Drucker.   Yet, upon witnessing Dr. Don Berwick conduct the classic "red bead experiment," he quickly joined the ranks of those deeply struck by the revelation that the performance of willing workers in any organization is largely governed by the system itself, far more than the performance of the workers taken separately.   So began his desire to review a series of videos and books about Dr. Deming, leading to his HBR article in 2016, a 6-page tribute to Dr. Deming, "The management thinker we should never have forgotten."

In parallel, he also wrote about Dr. Deming in a 2016 article for the Boston Globe.

Interview highlights include: 

• What’s happening at the HBR – expansion, podcasts, innovation, new and expanded audience
• Thinking systemically
• Needs of young professionals
• New HBR product launched in India, ASCEND
• Lasting impressions of the red bead experiment, including whimsical measures of quality
• Now, more than ever, the need for a refresher on Dr. Deming
• Layoffs and the erosion of trust
• How good people fall prey to a bad system
• Dr. Deming’s world of human nature
• Efforts that obliterate trust
• Barriers to success
• How workers treat each other in ways that are counter-productive
• Taylorism vs. Deming management
• HBR and the Watertown (Massachusetts) Arsenal, an early site of Taylorism
• Organizational undercurrents of “Us” vs “Them”
• Passion for innovation and a role as a digital renegade
• The need to be useful and feel valued
• The joy of learning